“Love” in a Post-Charleston World

Last year I wrote a book on unconditional love only to realize that I had interpreted the unconditionality of love very presumptuously. I wrote the book with one thought in mind – to convince the world that unconditional love is the answer. Much to my surprise, the thought of loving people without the prerogative to judge people was a very challenging concept.

On Wednesday, June 17, when Dylann Roof walked through the doors of Mother Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) Church in Charleston, sat and participated in the weekly Bible study before opening fire and viciously killing nine black Christians, I discovered he was welcomed unconditionally and I would venture to believe he was loved unconditionally in that very moment by the same people he moments later assassinated. I began questioning the viability of my latest book when I was reminded last week of the delicate balance existing between love and hatred in which our world hangs and the tension that is ever present in our highly racialized society. I was reminded once again that I live in a society wherein race matters profoundly and manifest in the differences in the way one experiences life, opportunities, and interpretations of justice because of the constant racializing of society. Professor Michael Emerson in “Divided by Faith” states, a racialized society can also be said to be “a society that allocates differential economic, political, social, and even psychological rewards to groups along racial lines; lines that are socially constructed.” Rewards that Rumain Brisbon, Walter Scott, Akai Gurley, Tamar Rice, Eric Garner, Ezell Ford, Michael Brown, Kajieme Powell, John Crawford III, Tyree Woodson, McKenzie Cochran, Sean Bell, Victor White III, Dante Parker, Jordan Baker, Yvette Smith, and the nine people including Pastor and State Senator Clementa Pinckney who were all gunned down last week will never have an opportunity to experience. Also the 1.5million black Men who are currently missing from our communities due to the mass incarceration will also miss the allocation of rewards.

My current feelings are like the words of Howard Thurman from his book “The Search for Common Ground.” I can also say “I too have been writing this book all my life.” My book is filled with pages of marginalization, chapters of apartheid, sentence upon sentence of separate water fountains, limited restroom access, seats at the back, and back door entrances instead of front doors. Until the events of last week in Charleston I had been reluctant to admit in the public space the influence the ideologies of white supremacy and patriarchy held over our society and the church and how inextricably linked our religious culture is to the systems of capitalism and empire, which are both rooted in the glorification of a belief in the inherent superiority of the White Christian narrative rooted in American triumphalism. The evangelical church must not turn its head and remain silent. It must join hands and hearts perhaps in a model of Parker Palmer’s book “A Hidden Wholeness.” where Parker teaches participants to learn to cultivate an ear to hear one another and In turn to hear God and to honor God within us all. The epidemic of violence against Blacks in America requires our joint participation to free our nation from this scourge of menacing evil.

The Charleston tragedy left me without my usual escape of unconditional love and forgiveness. I haven’t really felt like loving and forgiving. Even though I greatly admire the families of the victims who have been able to courageously express forgiveness in an amazing demonstration of reconciliation, I am currently stuck in a cycle of “prophetic pragmatism,” according to Dr. Cornel West,”a form of tragic thought that confronts candidly individual and collective experiences of evil… with little expectation of ridding the world of all evil.” What I need right now is some prophetic hope which could begin with whites in America atoning for the cruel enslavement of Africans throughout the Americas, the unjust incarceration of millions of black men, the repetitive murder of black people by law enforcement and others, and the discontinuance of acting as though the countless acts of violence against blacks is random, accidental, and ignorable. Black lives do matter! We too are God’s beloved sons and daughters. We did not choose this country, rather we were hunted, captured, and brought to America in chains, nevertheless this is now our home too and we are not going anywhere. Slavery was the malignant tumor that infected whites in southern America and manifested as a necessary evil in other regions of our country. Not many years ago the tumor was allegedly removed but cancer cells of racism, privilege, and a veiled form of supremacy remained and has gradually spread to every corner of our country. The time has now come to confront racism and bring an end to divisive practices that create fertile environments of hostility for domestic terrorist like Dylann Roof and others with thoughts of racial violence in our world.

Prophetic hope is my effort to counter evil and this hope is our call to prayer as defined by Henri Nouwen in “The Only Necessary Thing” which is to understand that “prayer stands for a radical interruption of the vicious chain of interlocking dependencies leading to violence and war and for an entering into a totally new dwelling place. It points to a new way of speaking, a new way of breathing, a new way of being together, a new way of knowing, yes , a whole new way of living” and I will add, “a whole new way of loving.” As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Love is the fire that will ultimately burn away the effects of hatred. Today is the day we can begin to love. Let’s begin making Wednesday night a night where we risk to stand watch for the opposition to love, fight for our freedom to love and be loved, and pray for God’s love to reign supreme in our lives and in our world.